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19 July 2002 (Day 308)

Blue. Warm.

18 July 2002 (Day 307)

The train journey into Bath takes fourteen minutes. Red lights and late-running services allow for one to reliably append five or six minutes on to that time. This allows me about twenty minutes, forty minutes each day, to shut out everything else and read. Time has been so scarce these last few weeks and I've been unable to lose myself in a book for months. As I write, my thoughts are full of books. I remember recently finishing Sartre's Modern Times; which leads me to remember reading Iris Murdoch's short study of Sartre last year. There's not much I remember of that book, which in turn leads me to remember the amusing essay by Patrick Suskind about such matters of memory loss, Amnesia in Litteris.

17 July 2002 (Day 306)

The house move has given us so many things to consider. We have much to clean and decorate, and much to buy. We decide which rooms to allocate our possessions to. I mourn the fact that my books are still consigned to the cartons that have been their home for the last three weeks, and I slice open the tape that seals each of them shut, as if to allow them to breathe.

16 July 2002 (Day 305)

Getting back to work comes as a relief. I'm glad to return to something regimented; to sitting in the seat that I am accustomed to; to staring at the screen which changes so infinitesimally each day I return to it; to escaping these new things in my life, so as I can embrace them once more when I see them next.

15 July 2002 (Day 304)

The hottest day of the month, reserved for the date that Charlotte and I had been anticipating for the last dozen or so weeks. Today we left behind the flat that had been our home together for the last three years. We managed only four or five hours of sleep, after returning so late last night, waking to set about the laborious task of moving boxes into the transit van that we had hired. It took three trips before we had emptied one property and begun to fill another, and such was the heat, dirt and monotony of the day that we walked into our new home with a strange sense of indifference. We concerned ourselves with finding a takeaway restaurant and making two of the beds up, one which would sleep Charlotte's parents who had come to help. There's a street light that burns its amber glow outside the window of the front bedroom. I can see it from the mattress on the floor before I go to sleep.

14 July 2002 (Day 303)

Like a soft, slow exhalation, the ferry eases out and away from Dieppe. I'm writing notes onto the outer layer of a sick bag that I picked up off the seat. These notes make a shoddy sketch of the last fourteen days. Before we boarded, we lay for an hour or so on the stoned beach. I held small stones at arm's length over my chest and dropped them against my skin and watched them bounce and clatter back into the ubiquity of my petrified bed. We looked out to sea: towards where we couldn't see our country. When we returned to the car we saw a dog locked inside the car opposite, frantically licking at the window of the passenger door, obviously distressed by the oppressive heat.

13 July 2002 (Day 302)

As we drive towards Blois, we come to a crossroads and we slow as the lights turn to red. A man, dishevelled, steps into the road holding a placard: some plea in a foreign language. I'm profoundly touched by this sight. I point him out to the others, who have already noticed him. The lights change colour before we are able to translate his message. He returns to the side of the road as we pass by and the cardboard sign drops dejectedly down, facing in towards his body.

We book into a hotel and the humble room on the first floor that we are directed to exudes luxury: we will sleep in a large bed; watch television and shower. Tonight is the evening before Bastille Day. We walk into the centre of Blois and sit down to eat in the courtyard dining area of one of the city's restaurants. Two hours later, after a walk around the winding streets of the old city, we head towards the river and find a seat at a bar. Thousands of faces tip back like white discs to reflect the celebrations of the sky. Tiny lights scream upwards and coloured fires burst into life over the Loire.

12 July 2002 (Day 301)

I'm reading Babylon by Victor Pelevin. Pelevin has been hailed as the true heir to Gogol, Bulgakov and Dosteovsky; as the 'future' of the Russian novel. I think his writing nods to Kafka far more than it does any of those aforementioned fellow countrymen. His work is littered with flashes of brilliance, but all of his books leave me unsatisfied. I could say that about not one of those other Russian writers. The present-day satirical references in his work bother me, I think, and halfway through this current book my fear is that I shall finish and think, 'so that's how I should have read it'.

11 July 2002 (Day 300)

With the threat of rain hanging over us for the fourth consecutive day, three of us decide to drive across the border and into Bilbao, and to the Guggenheim Museum. Even before we leave I'm excited by the prospect of this being the most enjoyable day of the trip. We drive through the Spanish villages of Zumaia and Duranga; villages where Basque flags fly and ETA slogans have been scrawled across the concrete of some of the bridges and walls that we pass. Industrial totems loom large over this part of the Basque country. We drive around Zumaia underneath a leaden sky, which drains the village of what little colour it has. We have trouble remembering our way back to the Bilbao road, which is a problem because we are critically low on petrol. A few tense minutes later we find the exit and petrol station together. When we get to Duranga it is busier, but we drive around and it feels like we're trespassing. A car across the other side of the road belches its horn at us and I spot the driver shaping his face and hands menacingly in our direction. There are white swastikas painted on some of the walls. We U-turn and decide to get to Bilbao before stopping for lunch.

It is worth the wait. Bilbao is an attractive city: I was prepared for something far uglier. The Guggenheim is much more, though. The Guggenheim is extraordinary. We see it against two skies: white as we arrive and a peerless blue as we leave. Titanium, stone and glass tower and arc towards the sky, unlike any architectural configuration that I have seen before. The inside of the building is equally magnificent, especially through the windows that reveal the reflective and opaque shapes of the exterior. The galleries contain their own glories. A seascape by Richter hangs in one of them. On the top level there is an exhibition of the photography of Wim Wenders, 'Pictures from the Surface of the Earth', which are beautiful. They come together like a photographic atlas of the world. They seem to convey emptiness and everything all at once.

We leave Bilbao and the sun and, with views of the stunning Pyrenees to keep us company, we drive back to Bidart.

10 July 2002 (Day 299)

Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is the most captivating piece of research that I can recall having read in a long time. This is due largely to the way that he crops his stories and allows individual lives to represent horrors that are panoramically true. If there is a more disturbing individual story throughout these 300-odd pages than that of Kenny Dobbins then it must have been hidden in the small print of the footnotes.

9 July 2002 (Day 298)

La Rhune is an antenna-topped mountain that lies half in France and half in Spain. We leave St-Jean de Luz early and drive the ten or so kilometres with the mountain in our sights all the way. We catch Le Petit Train and it takes forty slow minutes for us to reach the peak, with the temperature dropping a few degrees for each of the four kilometres that we climb. We reach the summit just as the clouds are gathering thickly around us. There is just enough time to walk over to the far side of the mountain top and catch a glimpse of Spain before it all disappears underneath the white. The cloud and cold sets in with incredible speed, greedily enveloping us, until we cannot see more than a few feet ahead. It's a beautiful moment.

8 July 2002 (Day 297)

We wake to the sound of rain. We eat breakfast to the sight and sound of rain. We sit under the awning and watch the skies turn a dangerous colour. Seconds later, we are witnessing the most incredible electrical storm. Thunder rolls relentlessly across the skies, sounding close and then in retreat, as though it cannot find its way out of Bidart. A fantastic crack of lightning flashes overhead and the skies push black shadows out of brilliant white objects for just a second or two as everything in way of the explosion becomes clearly lit. The next flash illuminates further off, and the next peal of thunder echoes from further away. Then further still, and we're aware that the storm is escaping. When it finishes, I go back to the tent and read. The day feels full.

7 July 2002 (Day 296)

We spend the day at Ciboure beach. There is a cemetery on a hill that overlooks the beach. The sign on the wall reads Boulevard Pierre Benoît, in memory of the French novelist who was born and buried here. I don't think I've ever been moved by the sight of a cemetery before. I would like to think that if people were to visit a place that memorialised my life it would look such as this, with a view that stretches out over the sea.

In the evening we drive over to St-Jean de Luz, and after eating we head towards Place Louis XIV and find a seat at the terrace of a bar there. We have come to see the 'Burning of the Bull', an annual tradition which sees locals parading a firework-shooting effigy around the packed square. Fathers and mothers occupy all of the seats close to where we sit, whilst their children run in between the groups of people, throwing confetti that they have bought from the stall in front of our seats. Thousands of tiny paper circles fly into the air. Hazel picks a small handful of confetti up from the floor and drops the pieces like petals over the head of a young girl, who turns to acknowledge our laughter and in doing so, admits each of us into her game. The children scoop deep into their bags and rush towards us, their hands a burst of colour before our faces. We laugh and reply, each of us quick to have purchased a bag of confetti. They circle the table, trying not to laugh through their glares of mock retribution. They arrive again, stuffing handfuls of paper down into our shirts, underneath our hats, into our mouths. There is a whirl of colour around us. Each of us is aware of how beautiful a moment this is: the first that we've all genuinely shared together. Our boisterousness hasn't gone unnoticed. More children gather around our table, stooping down and clawing hands across the pavement to refill their polythene bags from the mountains of fallen, coloured paper that lie around where we sit. The tenderness that we exchange with them is affecting; our pleasure so innocent and charming. It is close to midnight when we decide to leave and the sky is umber because the lamp lights prop the blanket of night up off the street.

6 July 2002 (Day 295)

One can stand before the sea with a sense of awe that few other vistas of this earth can arouse. If you can find a place with no-one in view ahead of you, then it's quite easy to shut out everyone that stands behind you. Alone like this, alone with this powerful, moving, colour-shifting sea, you are alone to ignore, alone to ask questions, alone to live by sensation. Uniquely alone.

5 July 2002 (Day 294)

We got our first real sense of the stunning Pyrenees today. We drive to the town of St-Jean Pied de Port and climb the steps of the seventeenth-century Citadelle until we are high up: above the town and the equal of many of the peaks that lie spread out across this distant and beautiful panorama.

4 July 2002 (Day 293)

Today it transpires that last night one of our friends lost the keys to the rental car that she and her partner had hired for the holiday. They spend much of the early part of the day travelling to and from the bar that we stayed at last night and they make and wait for phone calls. This deprives them of spending their day lying on this hot sand underneath this hot sky. I hear their story being told, but I'm detached and I'm emptying the details from my mind with each new spoken word that enters.

3 July 2002 (Day 292)

It can be when one is staring out at the sea. Or something less lofty. It can come in the transfixing of one's stare at the zip fastener of a tent flap. It can happen when you're ignoring the words of the person that's talking to you. It can happen when you're reflecting on the person that's ignoring the words that you're directing their way. It can happen in any of these ways, but it happens rarely. What occurs is that we grasp a tiny piece of truth about the world. Something that astounds us; something solid. Something that seems so much more incredibly real than everything else around us. What we're never prepared for is that it will be so fleeting, for it will leave with all the instanaeity of how it came. In noticing the flickering fluorescent tube above or the white crest that folds underneath a wave, it's gone. You see, that's all it takes. Pathetically, because we cannot hold on to our single piece of truth, we try instead to hold on to the memory that this truth appeared. We try to recall the space in front of us, which held our attention for the split-second before we focused on the zip fastener, but we are unsure of what significant or arbitrary detail to 'fill' this empty memory with. And so there it sits, like an empty cell in a bank of memories that cannot tell us anything about our lives. We have nothing to console ourselves with. We are crushed and fooled and back in the everyday. We recall that we held a tiny piece of truth about the world, but now we are again lost.

2 July 2002 (Day 291)

White and grey skies threatened us throughout the day. We sat down to lunch today just as the rain began to fall for the first time. From where I sat the sky looked like a dirty white sheet that had been hung out to slowly drip dry.

The rain passed. I looked into the Église St-Jean Baptiste, France's largest Basque church. Tiered oak galleries, gilded lights and monuments and the painted panels of a vaulted ceiling – all belied by the church's bland exterior – captivated me as I stood silent at the entrance. Something stopped me from walking inside, maybe the fact that I didn't belive in such a place; I'm not sure. So, like a petty thief stealing a glance at beauty, I simply stood there, awkwardly, by the door. The rain had gone but the skies still wore their grimace.

1 July 2002 (Day 290)

Lying on a beach exposed to the sun, feeling the heat and breeze of an unblemished azure sky and hearing the pat of water upon the sand. So beautifully alone, in the company of friends: these few hours from the day remain memorable.

30 June 2002 (Day 289)

We get news of the half-time score of the World Cup Final from the waiter at a roadside restaurant serving excellent stone-baked pizza in the small village of Belin-Beliet, 200-odd kilometres south of last-night's hotel. As soon as we hear the score I no longer miss not watching the game. Night stays away for about an hour or two after our arrival in Bidart, and we are able to pitch the tent in daylight. We walk to dinner under the orange of a strange French sky.
 

29 June 2002 (Day 288)

We journey by car to Newhaven to board the ferry that will take us over to Dieppe. Once across the sea we drive, at speed. We stop for lunch in Chartres – 'the stained glass capital of the world' reliably informs the brochure in hand. The cathedral here is spectacular; most of its windows date back to the Middle Ages, but there are imperfections – on the sand-coloured walls: the coppered streaks of green, the white-black shit of birds – that also frame and shout loudly about its beauty. We leave a couple of hours later in order to cover a further 200-or-so kilometres. We settle in Poitiers and find somewhere to sleep, then somewhere to eat, then somewhere to drink, then return to the place that promised sleep.

28 June 2002 (Day 287)

The next fortnight will be spent in France. Return to move house.

27 June 2002 (Day 286)

Packing boxes and little else.

26 June 2002 (Day 285)

An old man with a swollen stomach and jogging pants pulled up over the top of his rounded abdomen crosses at the lights in front of me. He wears glasses and his lips are sucked right inside his mouth, hinting at an absence of any teeth. Hands dance at his sides as he crosses the road, and once he reaches the other side, he turns around and casts a glance back to where he came from, as though to acknowledge his achievement.

25 June 2002 (Day 284)

My mother arrived, unannounced, and sat with us for a few hours. She wanted to see the flat for one last time, before we move next month, and for once (unlike her past surprise vists), I couldn't be angry with her, only sorry that we couldn't spend more time together. I came home from work as soon as Charlotte called me to tell me that she was here, and we sat in the flat for a while and then went for a short drive around Bath, before seeing her off at the bus station. Her legs were red and shiny, swollen from the two-and-a-half-hour bus journey. Had she taken her shoes off she would not have been able to put them back on. A friend came around during her visit and I was happy that mom got to see an extension of my life here; happy that she was able to show off in company other than my own; but, most of all, happy that for a few hours she was not alone.

24 June 2002 (Day 283)

It's almost impossible to write on days such as this when hundreds of competing thoughts are jarring against each other and time is so scarce that creativity has to make way for pragmatism.

23 June 2002 (Day 282)

Via a supplier at work I purchased 30 double-density flat-packed cardboard boxes, and tonight we began to fill the first few of them with items that have been stored in cupboards and under the bed for years. There is a bin next to the box and for every two pieces that make it to the box, one ends up in the bin. It takes two hours to clear a shelf that looks like ten minutes' work. Books and CDs will be the last to be stored away.

22 June 2002 (Day 281)

Spent the whole day catching up on the month so far, turning jottings, clippings and memories into twenty days' worth of writing.

21 June 2002 (Day 280)

Lost.

20 June 2002 (Day 279)

I went for a run about 10.30. The ankle responded well, better, indeed, than the rest of my body. I couldn't make it all the way back without stopping, so about a quarter of a mile short of the house, I found the bench at Camden Crescent and sat there, as calm and content as I've felt in a long time. This is one of the best views in Bath, especially at such a late hour, especially when it brings such welcome relief. I sat there for quite a while, in a beautiful state of tiredness. Trees in the foreground mask tower blocks. From behind the trees, I could hear screams and obscenities rebounding between several of the buildings. With an argument raging before me, rain petering slowly overhead, sweat cooling against my skin and breathing now fluent, I felt immensely – for want of what might be a better word – privelleged.

19 June 2002 (Day 278)

An arresting image on the front page of today's Guardian. The sunlit, outstretched arm of a victim of yesterday's Jerusalem bus bomb, tagged with a police identification number, with the lid of a bottle lying dejectedly nearby. The sun casts shadows from arm and object and gives the illusion that they are merely lying there – not dead, not discarded. It is the flecks of red that stain the sleeve and the skin of wrist and hand, and the abrasions to the fabric that covers the arm that finally ground this image in the terrifying reality of the day.

18 June 2002 (Day 277)

My head is full of details – visual parts of days gone past that I've not had time to shape into any other form. I wanted to fashion them better than this, but now I'm prepared to let them spill out, just to release them, however crude.

I remember a beautiful picture of Mars on the front of a newspaper, that I glimpsed along with a headline that included the words 'frozen' and 'water'. I remember a polystyrene cup, upright with a snapped white, plastic spoon speared through its middle and the dregs of coffee-chain brown abandoned at its base. I remember looking at a sky dense with clouds. Minutes later – or so it seemed – lone, tiny clouds danced quickly around a vast blue plain. I unfolded a chair and stood on the chair. I saw a man spitting, and watched an ant crawl across the office floor.

17 June 2002 (Day 276)

I left my mom's place at about 6.30. I waited about ten minutes for the bus. When it came, I took the first available seat and sat there slightly numb, and, for the whole of the journey into the city centre, wanting to get off and go back to her.

Two happenings – a coincidence – before I left Birmingham.

A stone against the window of the bus. It hit the window about three feet from where I was sat. Outside, children moved quickly away from the road, one laughing hysterically. Tuts from an old woman behind me, everyone else unmoved. I was glad of the shock. The glass didn't shatter.

Then, five or ten minutes after settling into my seat on the train, a glass bottle pelted against the window, three or four feet from where I was sat. Moving too fast to catch any culprit. Moving too fast for anyone to care. I was thankful again. I found solace in someone else's vandalism. I needed someone in that city to tell me to fuck off.

16 June 2002 (Day 275)

Dead flies. Living when I arrived. Back then, they circled each of the three rooms and hall:

Clothes waiting to be washed sitting on bleach-whitened floor tiles. In the corners of one of the rooms, cat piss shaped into spastic circles and ellipses across the linoleum.

Greasy finger trails on the fabric of a once blue sofa. A remote control underneath a chair; the television that the control operates. (I unite them once more, taking the control over to the table, brushing aside the shedded thin fur of the cats; the crumbs of bread, biscuits.) Foil glinting from the floor. An insert, discarded from a magazine with neat joined-up blue biro webbing over each letter-wide printed box. Marks smeared across window sill, and the wall below. A vase of fuchsias, immaculate in the centre of the table. A newspaper, barely touched, flat on the side table.

A face cloth, red, lined with fur. A cracked wooden toilet seat. Paint blistering and giving way to the ochre residues of plaster, dirt and painted layers of old.

Teabags placed into two ceramic mugs. A packet of bread, with a stale top slice that serves as a roof to preserve fresh slices below. Cat food in two brightly coloured, shallow, plastic dishes. A scouring pad, pinched and dry-set into deformity.

Flies. Dead flies.

15 June 2002 (Day 274)

Received a series of short films. I sat down to watch them at the end of the day and was captivated by the figurative and abstract snatches that fill many of the moments of my days too. Life: slowed down, smeared and diffused. The beauty of that which is commonplace, that which we take for granted, that which we can't easily discern.

14 June 2002 (Day 273)

Listening to Múm's 'The Land Between Solar Systems' almost incessantly.

13 June 2002 (Day 272)

Started reading True Tales of American Life, a collection of stories edited by Paul Auster. They are captivating snapshots of individual lives that extend to shed light on many familiar and collective experiences over the past two to three generations.

12 June 2002 (Day 271)

Bored by word after interminable word.

11 June 2002 (Day 270)

Finished George Monbiot's Captive State, which I had been dipping in and out of for a long time. Captive State is no great page-turner, but it is a worrying (albeit slilghtly tunnel-visioned) body of research concerning the rise and continued rise in power of Britain's corporations. The ramifications of this range from the decline of small businesses and the monopoly of large corporations to all-round decreasing welfare standards. The episode that unnerved me most, though, concerned the patenting of genes, whereby biotechnological companies can control the use of plants and therefore the food chain, and medical techniques, and therefore impede developments in medical research. Monbiot offers the example of St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, where doctors had devised a test for successfully determining whether someone possessed the cystic fibrosis gene. If discovered, it could help speed up diagnosis and treatment of the disease. A company in Toronto contacted the hospital in 1994 claiming to own the gene and demanded a licence fee and royalties for every time that the hospital carried out its tests. Back then, United Kingdom law meant that the company had no right to extract the money, but today, the risk of international agreement – allowing corporations to control such fundamental aspects of research – looms large. A realistic future could see research become prohibitively expensive and even inaccessible. Imagine, tomorrow, the limitation or cessation of tests in the field of cancer research, given the dramatic advances of the last few years.

10 June 2002 (Day 269)

Went to London for a work presentation. Afterwards, I set off through Hyde Park and headed for the Serpentine Gallery to see the Gilbert & George exhibition of their Dirty Words pictures. Ahead of me in the park, a bearded man stood stationary, staring into the grass at his feet. He held two soft fists by his side. His stillness saddened me. I passed him and he was unmoved. I looked back a minute or so later and watched him walking slowly towards the path which I had passed him on. Later, before, turning off towards the gallery, I turned around again to check his progression and found him back where I had first observed him, fists poised symmetrically at his sides.

The exhibition was a pleasant surprise. They were pictures more powerful than I had anticipated, juxtaposing street graffiti against the details of the artists' urban environment, with the portraits of Gilbert and George standing moral-guardian-like at the centres or channels of each piece. Swear words and slogans: expletives and 'calls-to-arms'; vented frustration, intolerance, ignorance and exuberance. The pictures explore poverty, unrest and inequality. They are politically and sexually charged and ask, quite simply, what is worse – the obscenities of a daubed language (with which we are all familiar and eloquent practitioners of) or the injustice of a perversely discriminative society? The pictures were made in 1977 (the Queen's Jubilee year), as an indictment of the country of the day. They are still incredibly resonant.

9 June 2002 (Day 268)

Out of the window a proliferation of colours. Some reoccur more than others. Greens everywhere, leaking out between the equally ubiquitous red brick, spewing from between concrete slabs. Yellow in ten shades just now. An azure lid.

8 June 2002 (Day 267)

An obituary for an Ethiopan long-distance runner.

7 June 2002 (Day 266)

Autodidact.

6 June 2002 (Day 265)

When I lie down, I say, 'When shall I arise, and the night be gone?' and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good.

The Book of Job (7: 4-7)